Women of all ages spend lavishly on each new beauty enhancement trotted out from hair dyes to wigs to contact lenses to alter eye colour and major plastic surgery.
Women shave or wax every hair from their bodies then glue extensions to their eyelashes, or one hair at a time directly on to their skin where once they grew eyebrows.
But last week Ghomeshi’s lawyer asked a question I expect had never been asked in court before. The lawyer asked the complainant who alleged Ghomeshi had yanked her hair hard, “At the time of the alleged assault, did you have hair extensions?”
A valid question, given that today so much of a woman can be fake.
Oldtimers recall this song about an elderly man’s wedding night:
We got married last Friday, my girl was right there beside me,
Our friends were all gone, We were alone side by side.
We were so happily wed when, She got ready for bed then
Her teeth and her hair, She placed in a chair side by side.
One glass eye so tiny, One hearing aid so small
Then she took one leg off And placed on a chair by the wall.
I stood there broken hearted, Most of my girl had departed
I slept on the chair.
There was more of her there side by side.
We’ve become accustomed to dyed hair, eye shadow, wigs worn even by those untreated for cancer. The newest fad is fake freckles.
For $28 you can order online a faux freckle kit, Freck Yourself. The kit comes with 72 self-adhesive stencils and a rollerball formula similar to sunless tanner and allows users to apply several layers of faded freckles on to the skin. The natural pattern doesn’t smudge and lasts two days. Applied every morning, though, the pattern can last from four to six weeks.
Natural redheads are noted for freckles. I’ve always considered freckles attractive. But comments on the Freck Yourself article report red hair and freckles leading to years of painful bullying.
One 30-year-old American studying film-making produced a Netflix documentary titled “Being Ginger” about his tribulations growing up a redhead.
A classroom teacher delighted in threatening to hang the filmmaker, when he was 7, upside down like a pinata for the other kids to beat. Interviewed by the filmmaker the teacher showed no empathy for the misery he had caused the boy.
When he was 12 and 13 he was so ostracized from the school cafeteria by one girl who sat at a table with his two best friends his principal armed him with a laminated permission slip to eat lunch alone sitting on the floor near the gym.
Any and all attention paid to him as a youngster came because of his red hair. Relatives fawned over him. Visitors felt free to stroke his hair much as strangers pat a pregnant woman’s belly. Being the centre of attention pained him so much that as an adult observing little kids cringe as they are singled out by relatives or strangers brings him to tears; he knows how exposed and ridiculed the tots no doubt feel.
As part of his documentary he attended an annual Redhead Fest in Breda, Netherlands where in 2013 a record 5,000 redheads from 80 countries gathered for a week of music and story-swapping.
For once he felt accepted, an average person drawing no special attention. And though he had never before felt any affinity to another ginger, he met a young woman from Boston. They shared a mutual attraction.
If his school yard bullying is typical for redheads, why would fake freckles be so trendy?